Panama, like the British Virgin Islands or a handful of well-known jurisdictions (including Delaware), was known as a top offshore destination for foreign assets well before 2012, when the U.S.-Panama Trade Promotion Agreement took effect. Today, in the aftermath of the jaw-dropping leak of the ‘Panama Papers,’ a 2011 video clip of Sanders, the insurgent candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, is now going viral.

But it’s far from evidence that Sanders was somehow prescient, and the suggestion that the U.S.-Panama free trade agreement somehow led to Panama’s reputation as a tax haven is disingenuous.

The truth is that offshore jurisdictions have been under siege for years, and the United States has been at the forefront of that fight. It began in earnest in the 1990s, a result of efforts to stymie money laundering related to drug trafficking. But it accelerated to warp speed after the 2001 terrorist attacks in response to concerns about the intricate networks that financed terrorism. Both before and after the aftermath of the global financial crisis in 2008-2009, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development took steps to force many of the worst global offenders, named and shamed on its ‘blacklist’ and ‘graylist’ of violators, to weaken their bank secrecy regimes.

That included, perhaps most notably, Switzerland, once the gold standard of secret bank accounts, which agreed to relent its famous standards of bank secrecy in 2009 and 2010. For the record, neither Panama nor the United States signed a more recent effort from 2014 to introduce greater tax transparency. Yet, under the Obama administration, the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) has put unprecedented burdens on foreign financial institutions in the effort to root out American tax cheats.

Despite the easy meme about Sanders, the U.S.-Panama free trade agreement was always about free trade.

Rising from the ashes of a widespread corruption scandal that tarred Italy’s entire political elite, Berlusconi, one of the country’s wealthiest businessmen, rose from 1994’s power vacuum to what would become nearly two decades dominating Italian politics. Though he lost power less than a year after his first election, he stormed back to power in 2001. Despite a short-lived turn in 2006 to the center-left’s Romano Prodi, Berlusconi once again returned in 2008. Forced to resign in 2011 amid a debt crisis, Berlusconi still led the Italian right to what amounts to a draw in the 2013 election.

It’s as if Italian voters just couldn’t help themselves, such was the spectacle of a showman that the Italian media dubbed ‘Il cavaliere,’ the ‘knight.’ Time and again, Berlusconi’s charms proved irresistible. It’s not out of the question that he might mount yet another comeback by the time that the 2018 elections roll around. Continue reading Why Trump isn’t quite an American Berlusconi→

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Suffragio attempts to bring thoughtful analysis to the political, economic and other policy issues that are central to countries outside of the US -- to make world politics less foreign to the US audience. Suffragio focuses, in particular, on those countries and regions with upcoming or recent elections.